Constellation follow up activities in the Amazonia

Back in 2014, the GalileoMobile BraBo project visited schools in the Amazon region of Brazil and Bolivia, bringing educational activities and material about Astronomy to nearly 3,000 school students and promoting teacher training workshops to 400 teachers. In the Brazilian state of Rondônia, a public school from Cacoal and two indigenous schools of the Suruí village in Território Sete de Setembro participated in the project. When visiting the city of Cacoal, GalileoMobile met a very enthusiastic group of students, teachers and local leaders interested in developing follow-up activities in astronomy.

Students from the Cora Coralina public school in Cacoal, Rondônia. Credits: GalileoMobile

For this reason, these visited schools were selected to take part in the Constellation project by GalileoMobile, which took place in 2015 in six countries of Latin America. Throughout this period, astronomers from GalileoMobile kept in touch with school teachers of those countries and promoted Astronomy related activities with the students. However during this period, contact was kept only through the distance, through the internet using teleconference software.

So now it is time to go back to Rondônia and meet in person once again! This is both to tighten the bonds that already exist and to include new schools in these Astronomy outreach activities. This time, we will promote new workshops with the teachers, activities for the students and we will make use of the telescopes that were donated to schools in 2014 during the public observations of the sky.

Moreover this time, our visit to the region of Cacoal will take into account the different characteristics of the local indigenous communities, always in dialogue with the local knowledge. In that sense we will enhance our efforts to have a larger cultural interchange, learning about Astronomy the way it is transmitted in the communities. Thus, besides transmitting our knowledge, we will learn from them, about their culture, their Astronomy and their cosmovision of the sky.

Students from the Suruí Community nearby Cacoal, Rondônia. Credits: GalileoMobile.

In order to purchase the necessary material for the activities, afford part of the expenses to bring a GalileoMobile team to the field and cover the costs of lodgings and accommodation, we have created a crowdfunding campaign on the Fiat Physica platform to finance ourselves in a collaborative way. We believe many people doing small actions together can achieve many great things!!

Please help us continue our efforts in the Amazonia! Please contribute to our crowdfunding campaign!